Murder at the Palace

by Margaret Dumas

  “Is there a maintenance crew?” I asked with faint hope.

  “A handyman,” Albert answered. “One day a month. Kate kept a punch list of things for him to do.” He shot me a glance, his sparse white hair a fluffy nimbus around his head. “I used to help with what I could, but I fear I’m not up to anything very strenuous anymore.”

  “Oh, of course…” The last thing I meant to suggest was that the ninety-some-year-old Albert should start scampering up ladders.

  “I’ve been coming here all my life,” he said with some pride. “Some of the most meaningful events of my life have taken place within these walls. My grandfather brought me to see Captain Blood here on my eighth birthday. Later I brought my children and grandchildren here, and when I retired twenty-one years ago I knew I wanted to spend as much time as I have left here, surrounded by my memories.”

  I was touched by Albert’s words, which raised a dozen questions, but before I had a chance to pursue any of them I jumped at an insanely loud rat-a-tat-tat of drums followed by the triumphant fanfare of horns announcing the beginning of a 20th Century Fox movie.

  “What was that?” I put a hand on my racing heart. It was still at least an hour before the first show, so a movie shouldn’t have been starting. And anyway, there was no light coming from the projection booth, and nothing followed the blast of music.

  “That was Marty,” Albert said. “Our projectionist. He’s an incredibly valuable asset to the Palace, but he can also be—if you will pardon my language—a complete ass.”

  “No worries,” I told him, recovering. “After a decade in Hollywood, if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to handle an ass.”

  That came out wrong, but it didn’t matter. Albert was already on his way downstairs.

  Three people were gathered in the lobby. A young woman looking at her phone, an even younger man gazing at her worshipfully, and a fortyish guy wearing faded jeans, a once-red t-shirt, and an unzipped gray hoodie.

  “Nora,” Albert said. “May I present Marty Abrams, our projectionist and the perpetrator of the daily assault on our ears.”

  The hoodie guy glared at me. He had dark shaggy hair and a salt-and-pepper stubble and looked like he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in years. “I like an overture,” he said. “Do you have a problem with that? Do you have a problem with me continuing to start my day the way I’ve been starting it for the past seven years at this theater? Do you? Because Kate didn’t.” He crossed his arms, still glaring.

  Right. I’d seen people lead with aggression before. It was more or less the default setting for many of the agents and producers I’d worked with on Ted’s behalf. I’d learned it was usually best to treat them like toddlers throwing tantrums. Respond to the words, not the tone.

  “I liked it,” I told him. “It seems like a fun way to start the day.”

  He blinked, momentarily thrown, I thought, before he responded. “Fun? It isn’t fun. It’s a call to greatness—it’s a call to arms!”

  The young woman sighed theatrically. This was probably directed at Marty, although she hadn’t looked up from her phone so it was a little hard to be sure.

  Marty pointed a finger at her. “Do not start with me.” Then he turned back to me. “And do not waltz in here thinking you know anything about anything just because you saw Some Like It Hot once on Turner Classic Movies.” He held up a hand. “Do not start with me on Turner Classic Movies, and do not get me started on Ben Mankowitz!”

  He seemed to expect an answer to this. I didn’t give him one. Although part of me was dying to know what the charming movie host Ben Mankowitz had ever done to deserve this level of hostility.

  “He knows what he did,” Marty said meaningfully.

  I raised my eyebrows and he sniffed in satisfaction. “I’ll be in the projection booth,” he announced. And with one last fierce look he stormed up the staircase.

  “He’s not as bad as he seems.” This was claimed by the teenager, who blushed bright pink to the roots of his ginger hair as soon as I turned to him.

  “Brandon Dunbar,” Albert introduced him. “Our latest addition to the Palace family. Brandon will be manning the concession stand today.”

  “Marty’s just been angrier than usual since Kate died,” the teenager explained. “We’ve all…I mean…” He flushed ever more deeply as he trailed off.

  “I get it,” I told him. “Robbie told me how close you all were to Kate. How much she really was the Palace. Believe me, I know I’m not Kate. And I’m not here to try to replace her. My biggest regret is that I didn’t ever meet her.”

  “Cool.” The college-aged woman now finally looked up from her phone. “But I kind of thought your biggest regret might be letting your man-slut of a husband go off on location with the most beautiful actress on the planet.” The expression on her face was one of flat disinterest.

  “Calandria Gee!” Albert looked appalled at the girl’s words.

  “Callie,” she corrected, looking at me with studied boredom. She was strikingly pretty, with wild dark curls surrounding the impassive face of a Renaissance Madonna. A Renaissance Madonna who kept up on all the gossip blogs, apparently.

  This was exactly the sort of conversation I’d fled LA to avoid.

  “Is he stupid?” Callie tilted her head and considered me. “Because anyone who knows anything about Priya Sharma knows it won’t last.”

  I hated myself for the surge of ridiculous hope that shot through me, which I immediately squashed. “Look—Callie, is it?” I had some half-formed notion of telling her off, but she continued as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “Maybe he is stupid,” she mused. “I mean, Priya Sharma has the brain power of, like, an unripe kumquat, and you’ve been kind of your husband’s unpaid manager or whatever since you gave up writing. So he’s kind of an idiot for dumping you for her, right? I mean, aside from him having to hire someone to replace you, you must know tons of stuff that could, like, totally screw him over if you wanted.”

  I blinked. Albert cleared his throat. Brandon looked between Callie and me like he was waiting for a grenade to explode.

  “Ted Bishop is one hundred percent an idiot,” I heard Marty say from behind me. He’d come halfway down the stairs again without me noticing. “The least of his crimes is his poor choice in mistresses.” Now he looked at me. “You should ruin him professionally and financially, and you should go back to LA to do it.” He glanced at Brandon. “Get me a Coke, will you?”

  Brandon jumped as if electrocuted and dashed behind the candy counter.

  “Callie runs the ticket booth,” Albert said, attempting valiantly to get the introductions back on track. “She is also an independent filmmaker.”

  “Documentaries,” she said, still eyeing me like I was a mildly interesting new specimen of something. “I’m studying film at SF State.”

  I choked out one word. “Right.” I figured it was safer than “Who the hell do you think you are to judge me and my marriage based on the self-serving rants of those so-called ‘close friends’ on the gossip sites, even if you do seem to be weirdly on my side?” Not as satisfying, but safer.

  Before anyone had the chance to voice any further opinions on my private life we were interrupted by a metallic screeching sound and an agitated yelp from Brandon. He held an extra-large cup under the ice dispenser, which clanked and shuddered before emitting a thin stream of water that continued to leak down the drain after Brandon took the cup away.

  “The icemaker’s out again,” he informed us.

  “Blast,” Albert muttered. “We just had it fixed last month.” He turned to me. “Never mind, we have a backup ice machine down in the basement. We can bring up buckets as we need them until we get this fixed again.”

  “Or replaced,” Marty said. “I’d replace it. But then I’m not the manager.” He gave me a look and came the rest of the way down the
stairs to the lobby. “I’ll haul the ice up. God knows I don’t have—”

  “No!” I hadn’t meant to shout, or to sound as desperate to get away from these people as I felt. “No,” I said again. “You all have things to do. I’ll go get the ice. It’s no problem.”

  I fled.

  I wasn’t proud of myself. I’d gotten flustered, and flustered was not strong. I would have given myself a stern talking to if I hadn’t been distracted by the realization that I had no idea where the ice machine was.

  Downstairs in the basement, I went past the restrooms to the farthest reaches of the maze of hallways, pulling out my phone to call Robbie and noting that, of course, there was no signal down there. I wrote a text instead.

  A great staff?!? You said there was a great staff! You didn’t say there was a giant Muppet with anger issues who thinks he should have my job and a judgie millennial who knows everything about my personal life! What did you get me into? And where’s the damn ice machine!?

  It wouldn’t send until I got a signal, but I felt a little better after banging it out. I wandered down a few wrong hallways, then followed an electrical humming sound to a room with a barred window high on a wall and a mismatched assortment of ancient machinery, one item of which was an old-fashioned ice maker. It was the kind that used to be in motel parking lots, where you could open the lid, reach in with a scoop and take all you needed. It was the unsanitary kind, and I told myself not to think of probable health code violations, but to focus instead on how fortunate it was that the huge old beast appeared to be plugged in, plumbed in, and operational.

  As I approached it I heard the whoosh of my outgoing text, and the chime of an incoming one. The room’s window must allow enough of a signal to get through. I would have to remember that for future desperate phone calls to Robbie, of which I was sure there would be many. I glanced at the screen.

  Baby. Where are you? I need you.

  Not from Robbie. From Ted.

  I realized I wasn’t breathing. This was a new phone. Only Robbie, my lawyer, and a handful of friends had the number. One of them had given it to Ted.

  Ted had wanted to contact me so much that he’d begged someone for my new number.

  Ted needed me.

  I was blinking up at the light from the window, my mind leaping to a million possibilities, when the phone chimed again.

  I can’t find the keys to the Bentley.

  And once again I realized I was the stupidest woman on the planet. Of course Ted needed me. He needed me to run his life. He needed me to take care of the thousand little things a day that were too unimportant for him to think about until he needed them, at which point they became crucial. He needed me to make his excuses, make his decisions, make his breakfast. He needed me in a million different ways, but that hadn’t stopped him from leaving me.

  “Well, guess what, Teddy,” I said out loud. “I don’t need you!”

  I flung back the lid to the ice machine and screamed. Not because of Ted. Because there was a dead man in the ice.

  Chapter 3

  Everyone came pummeling down the stairs to see what had made the new girl scream her head off. After that a certain amount of time was taken up by us all completely freaking out, and then Brandon fainted, so we closed the lid on the dead man and hauled Brandon back up to the lobby. Albert sat down alarmingly suddenly on his ticket-taker’s stool, all the color drained from his face, and I reached for my phone to call an ambulance for him.

  Callie beat me to it. “911?” she said. “Yeah. We’ve got one unconscious guy, one possible heart attack guy, and one, like, dead guy. You should probably send everyone.”

  “I am not having a heart attack,” Albert said, with ruffled dignity, as Brandon moaned and came around.

  Nevertheless, 911 sent everyone.

  “And you’d never seen the victim before?”

  I was questioned by a heavyset detective with a hipster goatee and a voice like melted chocolate. He’d told me his name at least three times, but I hadn’t registered it. I think I might have been in shock.

  I shook my head.

  “You’re sure?” he persisted.

  “I just got here,” I said. “I mean, not just to the theater, but to the city. I got here yesterday and I don’t know anyone.”

  He nodded and wrote something down.

  “Is there someplace you could wait for a while?” he asked. “Do you have an office or something? We may have more questions later.” He glanced around the lobby, which was filled with a cluster of police talking to Marty and Callie, a cluster of EMTs checking out Albert and Brandon, and several other clusters of grim-faced professionals doing the things they do when a dead body turns up in an ice machine.

  “Sure,” I said, wanting nothing more than a few moments away from everybody. I probably had an office somewhere. I’d just have to find it.

  It wasn’t my office. It was Kate’s office. That much was clear from the second I found it.

  It was upstairs on the balcony level in an administrative area hidden behind an unmarked door so camouflaged by the ornate carving of the wall’s wooden paneling that I wouldn’t have noticed it if Albert hadn’t pointed it out on our tour.

  The door opened to a hallway which gave access to the projection booth, a tiny restroom, a staff break room, and at the far end against an exposed brick wall, another stairway. The back stairs, I thought. Narrow, iron, and utilitarian.

  Halfway down the hall was the closed door to Kate’s office. I still had Kate’s keys in my jeans pocket, but the door was unlocked. The room was lined with crowded shelves and dominated by an enormous old oak desk and a freestanding blackboard. Both looked like they could have been in the room since Clark Gable was number one at the box office. Shabby furniture cluttered the space, and a window looked out over the top of the marquee to the street below.

  The blackboard was covered in cramped handwriting. There were calendar grids for September, October, and November, each with the schedule of films filled in for the month. Clearly nobody had updated it since Kate’s death. The slate changed on Tuesdays and Fridays and seemed always to consist of two or three features on a common theme. That added up to a lot of movies.

  Robbie had told me the films were ordered many weeks in advance, and the slate was already booked through the holidays. Still, the prospect of keeping up with the programming and sourcing of films might have seemed a little overwhelming if I hadn’t already been overwhelmed by the vivid image of a dead man’s frost-glazed face staring at me from a bed of ice.

  I sat at the desk in an ancient wooden rolling armchair made somewhat more comfortable by a faded crimson pillow. Kate’s desk was cluttered with brochures for film festivals, fliers for special events, and dozens of notes scrawled on pages pulled from a scratch pad next to the telephone.

  Telephone. Right. A beige hard-wired multi-line monster, looking like it dated from the Eighties. What about a computer? A quick glance around the place didn’t reveal one. A pale blue IBM Selectric typewriter, yes, but no computer.

  Seriously?

  “I brought you this.”

  I jumped at the sound of Callie’s voice. I had turned away from the door, but now saw her standing in the hallway, looking in. She held my leather backpack by one thin strap. “It was in the balcony. It’s yours, right?”

  “Oh, right.” I must have left it there a thousand years ago at the end of Albert’s tour. I looked at my watch. It had been two hours. “Thanks.”

  “Sooooo…” Callie stepped into the room a little gingerly, looking uncomfortable. She dropped the backpack on the desk. “Are you, like, okay?”

  “Absolutely not.” I said. “There’s body in the ice machine. Are you okay?”

  “Probably not.” She shrugged, then, “Sorry about all that stuff about Ted Bishop earlier.” She gave me a quick glance, then looked away. “Are,
like, we okay?”

  I blew out a breath. “Sure.”

  “Cool.” Her shoulders relaxed a bit. “What are you doing?”

  I looked around the room. “At the moment, wondering whether that blackboard is the most advanced technology in this place.”

  “Oh. No. Kate had a laptop. Marty’s been using it to send out the email blasts and update the website and everything.” She looked at me with eyebrows raised. “You know he’s going to go nuts with this.”

  Marty seemed pretty nuts to begin with, but I let that thought go unspoken. No, I didn’t. “More nuts?”

  She grimaced and slumped onto an ancient leather sofa under the window. “He’s really not that bad,” she said. “He just tends to go from zero to furious in, like, no seconds.”

  “I noticed.” She was the third person to tell me Marty wasn’t that bad.

  She shot me a look. “He took Kate’s death hard. I mean, we all did,” she said. “But the rest of us just miss her. We don’t think someone killed her. And I heard the cops say that guy has probably been down there for about two weeks, which is right around when Kate died, so you know…What?”

  She must have seen what must have been a confused look on my face. “Who thinks someone killed Kate?”

  “Marty,” she said, her tone implying that I needed to keep up. “He’s been going off about it ever since she died.”

  I stared at her. “How did Kate die?” Robbie had said “accident” and I had automatically filled in “car crash,” but I didn’t really know.

  “She fell,” Callie said. “She was walking on the path up Strawberry Hill—at Stowe Lake?” Seeing my baffled expression, she explained. “It’s in Golden Gate Park, and it’s a totally easy path. I mean, like, people do it with strollers and stuff. But she must have slipped or something and...” Her jaw flexed and she looked away from me. “Her neck was broken.”